Francisco Antonio Encina

Francisco Antonio Encina
Francisco Antonio Encina in 1903
Member of the Chamber of Deputies
In office 15 May 1906 – 15 May 1912
Constituency	Linares, Parral and Loncomilla
Personal details
Born	(1874-09-10)10 September 1874 San Javier de Loncomilla
Died
Nationality	Chilean
Political party	National Party (1906–1914) Nationalist Party (1914–1920)
Education	University of Chile (LL.B.)

Francisco Antonio Encina Armanet (10 September 1874 – 23 August 1965) was a Chilean historian and philosopher. His monumental History of Chile from Prehistory to 1891 was a bestseller and earned him the National Literature Prize in 1955 (before the National History Award was instituted). Together with Alberto Edwards and Jaime Eyzaguirre, he was one of the three most widely read and influential Chilean historians of the 20th century.

He was a noted member of the Centennial Generation, a heterogeneous group of Chilean intellectuals (among them Alberto Edwards, Carlos Keller, Nicolás Palacios, Tancredo Pinochet, Luis Emilio Recabarren and others) who, on the occasion of the 100th anniversary of Chile's independence from the Spanish Empire, made a negative and pessimistic assessment of the republican project (both Edwards and he idealized the era of the Kingdom of Chile). Encina, like the rest of his generation, saw an overwhelming "moral crisis of the nation", to which was added the problem of economic poverty.

His work was profusely cited in the 1960s by economists and historians and, despite the great length of his 20-volume History of Chile, "it has been read (at least partially) by most Chileans with a medium cultural level". His figure remains both influential and controversial, particularly because of the racial concepts that permeate his work; unlike Palacios, Encina did not see miscegenation as something positive, but as a corrupting element of the "superior visigoth element". The crossbreeding with the indigenous population was what deprived Chile of a better historical destiny, in the same way, he postulated that the national crisis of the early twentieth century was explained, at least in part, by the racial factor.

Currently, one of his greatest critics within the academic world is the historian Sergio Villalobos, who tends to dismiss his work because of the racism he find in it (even though Villalobos himself was labeled a racist by his colleagues). On the contrary, historian Alfredo Jocelyn-Holt has written that "it is difficult to find a Chilean historian more reflective, more willing to think and rethink history and not just content himself with researching and writing it", and defines him together with Alberto Edwards as "our most influential political thinkers of the twentieth century". The philosopher Hugo Eduardo Herrera is one of the contemporary intellectuals who has most rescued his ideas, in particular for his "remarkable ability to combine prospective penetration of the concrete situation with ideas that allow an illuminating understanding of it", and the "[undoubted] philosophical density of his thought" that the scholar finds in his political essays.

During his political incursion he was deputy of the Republic on two occasions (1906–1909; 1909–1912) for Linares, Parral and Loncomilla while he was a militant in the National Party (Monttvarist). A few years later he founded the ephemeral Nationalist Party of Chile together with Alberto Edwards, Luis Galdames Galdames and Ramón Subercaseaux Pérez. His books Our Economic Inferiority (1912) and Economic Education and the Lyceum (1912) were the theoretical basis of the movement.

Biography

Family

Francico Encina was born at San Javier de Loncomilla, the son of Pacífico Encina Romero, who was a deputy between 1891 and 1894, and Justina Armanet Vergara. He belonged to a family of important landowners who had great social and political influence in the southern Maule Region, mainly in Linares Province. Among his direct ancestors are the military and colonial landowners José Francisco Vergara Rojas, José Vergara Silva, José Miguel Martínez de Vergara y Carbonell, José Martínez de Vergara y Varas and Juan Martínez de Vergara y Leiva Sepúlveda. Encina had French heritage through his mother, who was the daughter of the immigrant Francisco Armanet y Gérard (born in Pau, France); and granddaughter of Joseph Antoine Armanet, an officer in Napoleon Bonaparte's armies and aide-de-camp to Marshal Michel Ney at the Battle of Waterloo.

His great-great-grandfather, the Italian Giovanni della Croce Bernardotte, was one of the main founders of Talca. While his great-great-grandfather Nicolás de la Cruz Bahamonde, 1st Count of Maule, became a Deputy in the Cortes of Madrid for the Kingdom of Chile.

Early life and education

In his adolescence, he stood out for his excellent academic performance and his fondness for reading philosophical works. He studied at the Lyceum of Talca (today Lyceum Abate Molina), which at that time had Adolfo Armanet, his mother's uncle and who would be of great importance in his education, as rector. When he had to take his final exams to pass his baccalaureate, he requested a special commission brought from Santiago. Encina attended the University of Chile, where he studied law, obtaining his degree in 1896. Encina himself would mention that during his university years, both the Larraguirre brothers and Valentín Letelier were an important intellectual stimulus. After a brief professional law practice, he devoted himself entirely to his agricultural work.

Career overview

He entered politics in 1906, being elected as deputy for the National Party on two occasions (1906 and 1912). After the early 1910's, he did not hold another public office. During the parliamentary governments of Chile he was offered numerous portfolios, specifically as Minister of Finance, Justice and Education and Instruction, refusing to take any of them.

In 1912 he published his first book Our Economic Inferiority, a compilation of lectures he had given the previous year, and Economic Education and the Lyceum, both texts related to the Pedagogical Congress held in Chile in 1912. This material was the ideological basis of the project that Encina carried out together with other intellectuals of the time. As the proposal did not prosper, he moved away from active politics. The party sought to eradicate the influence of religion from politics, strengthen the Executive Branch, create a Central Bank, protect national industry, favor national industry at the expense of foreign capital, and establish compulsory primary education.

Living a peasant and rural life, Encina collected documents and books on the history of Chile; in 1934 he launched a new and controversial work: Portales. The following year Encina was admitted to the Chilean Academy of History, and in his acceptance speech he discussed the topics that he would later deepen in Chilean Historical Literature and the Current Concept of History (1935). This was followed by his most famous book: History of Chile from Prehistory to 1891, published in twenty volumes by Editorial Nascimento. The History of Chile was a great success and has been republished numerous times up to the present day.

At the height of his fame, Encina turned down the position offered to him as an academic member of the Faculty of Philosophy and Humanities of the University of Chile, and another as a member of the Chilean Language Academy. Years before he had already rejected a chair of Law at the University of Chile.

In 1955, he was awarded Chile's National Prize for Literature.

Francisco Antonio Encina died in Santiago de Chile.

Private life

He married María Amelia Barker Romero, his cousin, with whom he had three children. His granddaughter Gisela Silva Encina (known for her works in favor of the military dictatorship) is also a historian.

Thought

A historical-philosophical analysis of Chile

Encina lived in a rather turbulent period, marked by protests and social unrest. Both he and the intellectuals of the time produced important essays that attempted to respond to the crisis of the centenary (1900–1934). For Javier Pinedo, professor at the University of Talca:

[..] Of the authors of the centenary, the most cited by economists, essayists and historians of the 1960s is undoubtedly Francisco Antonio Encina (for or against), because in addition to embodying the spirit of his time, he is the one who proposed the most interesting program of action to overcome the crisis.

Like his contemporary Alberto Edwards, Encina idealized the Kingdom of Chile and colonial life; likewise, both saw in Diego Portales not only the "continuator of the imperial model," as it is often presented by researchers, (Portales was not in favor of independence from the Spanish Empire) but the one who established the dignity and solidity to the independent state that would last the rest of the sixty years of pelucones and conservative governments, making Chile an example of stability and political order in Latin America.

At the same time, he believed that the Chilean aristocracy had lost its chivalrous and impetuous spirit for a banal and uncompromising one. For Encina, the decadence of the Chilean white elite originated with the triumph of the liberals and the imposition of the anti-statist policies of the libertarian economist Jean Gustave Courcelle-Seneuil (whose influence still endures today in the circle surrounding academics such as Axel Kaiser), which consisted of lowering tariffs and allowing the entry of foreign products and companies, thus leading to the decadence of the national entrepreneurial spirit and the surrender of the country to large foreign companies. Even so, Encina's criticism was directed at the whole of the national population, among the causes of the crisis that he identifies in our idiosyncrasy are:

• Lack of objectives at the time of creating a company.
• Lack of rigor.
• Rivalry between businessmen and workers.
• The obstinacy in implementing an agrarian economy in a country with a geography unsuitable for it.
• Inability to understand the codes of the modern industrial economy.
• Education tending to liberal arts and not to technical and industrial careers.

The solution he proposed consisted of a classic nationalist project; to establish an education that stimulates the entrepreneurial spirit while promoting a return to statism and protectionism aimed at strengthening national industry until economic development is achieved.

A racial interpretation of Chilean history

The most controversial aspect of Francisco Antonio Encina's work is his racial interpretation of the facts. The influence that the physician Nicolás Palacios had on his work was admitted by himself, and is reflected in the fact that both believe that the Spanish conquerors in Chile have an ethnic composition different from that of the rest of the colonies and of the "average peninsular Spaniard". For both authors, the Chilean Creole descended from Spaniards with a greater Visigothic genetic load, although Encina qualifies this theory by stating that Palacios exaggerated the proportion.

Although Palacios and Encina both postulate that miscegenation altered the psychological qualities of the Chilean population, they found their greatest difference in their assessment of this fact: Encina regreted that miscegenation destroyed the eventual prosperity of the European colonies in North America, which kept their European blood intact, while Palacios was in favor of the ethnic mixture of the Chilean.

For Encina, the stratification of Creole society and the political power of the aristocracy has a racial explanation: "Chilean society was constituted by a social range, which, in general, coincides with the ethnic range: at the top, the Chilean with the most Spanish blood, and at the bottom, the one with the most aboriginal blood".

One of the theses of Our Economic Inferiority (1912) is that the mestizo descended from two races whose psychology was still rudimentary and hostile to manual labor; on the one hand, the white Spaniard:

[...] provided the paternal contribution of our race was more warlike, more daring and more energetic, in a word, an ethnic element much closer even to the purely military type [...] As a consequence of this proximity to the military stage, it shared the contempt that all races in the same social status have professed for manual trades, for commerce and for economic activity in general.

While the indigenous:

[...] he had not yet emerged from barbarism, not only did he have an invincible repugnance for work, but he had not yet developed the aptitudes that make it possible.

Encina's influences are found in compatriots and contemporaries such as Nicolás Palacios and Alberto Edwards; from the latter he absorbed many concepts of Spenglerian philosophy. Herbert Spencer and Charles Darwin were also essential in his intellectual development, and it is documented that he read in the original the racial theorists of the time, among them the Frenchman Joseph Arthur de Gobineau, Gustave Le Bon and Georges Vacher de Lapouge.

Major publications

• La Educación Económica y el Liceo (1912)
• Nuestra Inferioridad Económica, sus Causas, sus Consecuencias (1912)
• Portales: Introducción a la Historia de la Época de Diego Portales (1934)
• El Nuevo Concepto de la Historia (1935)
• La Literatura Histórica Chilena y el Concepto Actual de la Historia (1935)
• Historia de Chile desde la Prehistoria hasta 1891 (1940–55; 20 volumes)
• La Entrevista de Guayaquil: Fin del Protectorado y Defunción del Ejército Libertador Chileno (1953)
• Emancipación de la Presidencia de Quito, del Virreinato de Lima y del Alto Perú (1954)
• Resumen de la Historia de Chile (1954; edited by Leopoldo Castedo)
• La Relación entre Chile y Bolivia (1841–1963) (1963)
• Bolívar (1957–1965; 8 volumes)
• Ensayos sobre el Pensamiento Histórico (2022)

External links

• Works by Francisco Antonio Encina at Open Library
• Works by Francisco Antonio Encina at Biblioteca Nacional de España